Category: Drink

zero-proof breakfast cocktail

3 ounces Ruby Red grapefruit juice

1 teaspoon dehydrated grapefruit juice powder – I use citrus powders to intensify fruit flavors in a recipe without throwing off the liquid ratios. This works really well in frostings and glazes. These powders can be found easily online. In this recipe, it’s optional, but really does dial up the level of grapefruitiness.

2 ounces alcohol-free gin – I used Free Spirits this time, and it provided a mellow backnote of juniper to the proceedings. Because it is alcohol-free, it too can be easily ordered online, or even found in some supermarkets.

¾ ounce honey syrup (see below)

1/8 teaspoon rose water

Pour the grapefruit juice into a cocktail shaker, then stir in the grapefruit powder with a bar spoon or a pair of chopsticks. Mix vigorously for 15 or 20 seconds to make certain that the powder has dissolved completely. Avoid ice for the moment; this won’t work as well in a cold solution.

Add the other ingredients, then dry shake them (this means to shake them without ice). Again, you are forcing an introduction here, and it will probably go better if the ingredients aren’t keeping to themselves in separate corners, wearing coats and huddling around radiators.

Once everything is well mixed, add ice, and shake it again. Strain into a coupé glass, and sip to some morning-themed music — Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” or Nina Simone’s cover of “Here Comes the Sun,” perhaps.

Because there is no actual alcohol involved, this is a really good breakfast cocktail.

I know, that term hurts a little to think about, but because the “gin” here is just a flavoring agent, this drink can be a very nice start to your day. It’s pink, it’s fruity but also little bracing, and there is a hint of perfume at the very end. Grapefruit, like most citrus, pairs well with almost any other ingredient, and the tiny hit of juniper from the alcohol-free gin puts a thoughtful spin on the combination. This scales up beautifully to a pitcher drink.

If the idea of a breakfast cocktail is still a bit uncomfortable, imagine this:

A team of clients is in your conference room for an early morning presentation. Your team and their team have worked together before, and they’ve been happy with your work, but you’re still getting a sense of caution from them. You know that your presentation is solid, but you need them to approach it with an open mind.

After your assistant sets up the coffee and bagels on the table at the back of the room, she walks around the conference table, and places a coupe glass in each place, then fills each one halfway with this delicate pink cocktail from a martini pitcher. After your assurance that there is no alcohol involved, the senior member of the other team takes a tentative sip, pauses thoughtfully, then with one raised eyebrow takes a deeper sip and sighs, just a little, with pleasant surprise. The rest of the client team will take their cues from her, and a few minutes later that attitude of open-minded receptiveness will pay off when your slide presentation takes a turn to the unexpected, mixing sales charts with photos of armadillos and bagpipe music.

Honey Syrup

This is probably the easiest of syrups to make. Combine equal amounts of honey and boiling water, and stir to combine. Let it cool, then use for any number of beverages. The diluted honey will mix more readily with your tea or cocktail than it would at full strength. Mixed with plain club soda it makes an unexpected and delightful soda.

This recipe is adapted from one that was published in a Bacardi advertisement from 1976. It holds up.

• 1 cup (133 g) finely chopped roasted, salted pecans
• 1 box (375 g) yellow cake mix
• 1 3.4-ounce package instant vanilla pudding mix
• 4 eggs
• ½ cup (225 g) milk
• ½ cup (1 stick) butter
• ½ cup (225 g) dark or black rum

Preheat oven to 325°F.

In a small saucepan, brown the butter: Over low heat, melt the butter, and stir or swirl almost constantly until it turns brownish gold, a tawny color, not unlike a lion. Remove it from the heat, and let it cool to room temperature. Strain it to remove the milk solids you’ve so cleverly rendered out.

Use a large spoonful of butter to grease the inside of a Bundt pan. If you have experienced the heartbreak of a Bundt cake not coming cleanly out of its pan, and ripping itself into pieces; if you are intimidated by Bundt pans; if you have young children you do not want to expose to intemperate language — there is a solution: absurd amounts of butter. Wash your hands, and really slather the butter on, hitting every corner and crevice. Make certain you give special attention to the central column. If you feel like you have buttered it enough, you need to add more. Obsessive over-indulgence is the order of the day here.

Sprinkle your finely chopped pecans across the bottom of the Bundt pan. This will be the top of your cake.

In a large bowl, combine all the other ingredients, including your browned butter. Stir the mixture until there are no dry bits or lumps, then pour it into your waiting Bundt pan. Use a silicone spatula to transfer all of it.

Thump the pan on your countertop with authority. Give the cake batter a good, hard stare to let it know that you aren’t fooling around, then give it a couple more solid thumps. This will make sure that all the batter has been seated into your carefully buttered crevices.

(The pan’s crevices, that is. Yours are your own business, and beyond the purview of a cake recipe.)

Bake the cake for about an hour, or until the center reaches 200°F. Remove it from the oven and let it cool in the pan for 15 or 20 minutes.

Invert the cake onto a plate. I like to rise up on my toes, then jerk the pan and plate downward with some force. You should be rewarded with a soft thump.

Carefully remove the Bundt pan to make certain everything turned out well (literally, in this case), then replace the pan on the cake, and re-invert it, so that you are looking at the bottom of the cake.

With a wooden skewer, stab the cake 100 times, then set it aside while you make some rum syrup.

Rum Syrup

• ½ cup (1 stick) butter
• ¼ cup water
• 1 cup (198 g) sugar
• Another ½ cup (225 g) dark or black rum

In a small saucepan, probably the same one you used earlier, bring the butter, water and sugar to a boil. Boil it for another five minutes, then remove it from heat. Let it cool a few minutes, then stir in the rum.

Slowly pour about half the rum syrup over the cake. Give it a minute or two to absorb into the cake through all those holes you poked, then pour the rest of the syrup over it.

Set the cake aside for an hour or two to completely integrate the rum syrup, then re-re-invert it onto a serving plate.

Rum cake goes exceptionally well with not-very-sweet coffee or tea. The sweetness and moisture of the cake makes a clean contrast with a hot beverage. The rumminess makes a good contrast to the hard work and disappointment in your life.

Cranberry Margarita

Everything was quiet, mostly.

Very few houses are actually quiet at night. Every time the wind blows, a house will usually flex a little, settling in one direction with a creak or a soft cracking noise. But around 2:30 this morning, everything briefly went completely quiet. If there had been anybody still awake, the sudden, complete silence might have startled them. That’s one of the things science fiction generally messes up on; if you’re dealing with a temporal anomaly — and how could you not be, if you’re trying to visit more than two billion houses in a night — sound doesn’t know how to work under those conditions.

The Old Man came down the chimney, set his bag to one side. He looked at the stockings waiting for him, but out of habit, looked for the traditional milk and cookies. Instead, his eyes fell on a waiting tray table. Laid out carefully, there was a small dish of cocktail peanuts, a cocktail shaker, an ice bucket and a martini glass. The Old Man’s eyes sparkled as he used the tongs that Rachel always left for him — always had, since she was a college student — and dropped three ice cubes into the shaker and shook himself a cocktail.

He carefully strained it into the waiting glass, helped himself to a few peanuts for the salt, then with a sigh, took a grateful sip of his margarita, and set to filling the stockings with his unencumbered hand.

Some parents just get it.

Cranberry Margarita

2 ounces Blanco tequila – I like Hornitos

1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

¾ ounce homemade cranberry syrup (see below)

Combine all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake this cocktail brutally, then strain into a coupé glass.

If you have something sweet and syrupy, you can almost certainly use it to make a pretty good margarita. Cranberry syrup takes things one step further, firmly into Delicious territory. Cranberry goes extremely well with lime. Both fruits are puckeringly sour and can stand up to the tequila’s assertiveness. The sweetness of the syrup mellows everything out and makes this smooth and very, very drinkable.

Cranberry Syrup Two Ways

Combine equal amounts (by weight) of frozen whole cranberries and white sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, crush berries, and allow to steep for 30 minutes. Strain and bottle.

or

Combine equal amounts (by volume) of unsweetened cranberry juice and white sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil. Leave on a boil for 10 to 20 seconds to make sure the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat. Allow to cool, then bottle.

Either version will be delicious — like grenadine with a better personality. The whole-fruit version will be a bit thicker, due to the pectin in the berries. The juice version will be a little thinner and clearer.

The story goes that everyone in Brazil drinks caipirinhas when it’s oppressively hot. And because Brazil is on the equator, it’s oppressively hot pretty much all the time.

The ingredients for a caipirinha couldn’t be simpler: a lime, sugar, and a couple ounces of a Brazilian alcohol called cachaça, a sort of cousin to white rum. Most rum is made from fermenting molasses, a byproduct of sugar production. Cachaça is made by fermenting unprocessed sugarcane juice. It tastes like a slightly sour, faintly musky rum. That sourness plays extremely well off crushed limes.

Because the caipirinha — which is apparently pronounced “kai·pr·ee·nyuh“ — is so entrenched in Brazilian culture, it has inspired strongly held beliefs and heated disagreements. One of the most strongly argued caipirinha disputes is whether it needs to be made with granulated sugar, as caipirinha purists insist, or if it can be made with sugar syrup, like 95 percent of the sweetened cocktails in the world.

Because of my deep commitment to world peace, I decided to try the two versions side by side.

Here is the classic recipe for a caipirinha:

• 1 lime, sliced into wedges
• 2 teaspoons table sugar
• 2 ounces cachaça – which is apparently pronounced “kuh-shah-sah,” which sounds like an obscure type of martial arts weapon. “This is no ordinary murder, Higgins; this man was killed by a cachaça.”

Muddle the lime wedges and sugar in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. There will be a lot of juice, so don’t smash the limes like you might normally with a muddler. Grind it down hard, for longer than you might normally, but make sure you don’t splash.

Add cachaça and ice, then stir thoroughly with a bar spoon and pour into a rocks glass. Some bartenders suggest garnishing it with a lime wheel, but there is so much lime in this drink already, that seems a bit like overkill.

The theory is that the sugar acts like an abrasive and helps strip citrus oil out of the lime peel. That seems unlikely; logic would suggest that the crushed lime produces so much acidic juice that the sugar is dissolved almost instantly and doesn’t have time to abrade anything. But let’s withhold judgment; sometimes Reality ignores Logic mercilessly.

OK, let’s set this aside and make a second caipirinha, with sugar syrup. Do everything the same, but add two teaspoons of simple syrup at the same time as the cachaça.

Crush, crush, crush, pour, pour, clink, clink, clink. Stir, stir. Pour/clink/gurgle. Let’s take a look at the two caipirinhas side by side.

They both look and smell delicious.

Taking a sip of the caipirinha made with syrup: **Raised eyebrows** This is a very solid cocktail. It’s a little sour and musky from the cachaça, just sweet enough, and a love letter to lime.

That’s going to be tough to beat. Let’s try the classic caipirinha: **Pupils dilate, ceiling opens up, the sound of angels singing fills the kitchen**

I realize that I’m still standing in my kitchen, but for just an instant I was sitting on a patio surrounded by tropical flowers while samba music played in the background.

The caipirinha made with sugar is better by several orders of magnitude. This is the real love letter to lime, written with a fountain pen, using sophisticated metaphors and a complex rhyme scheme. In comparison, the other one was a late-night text, asking, “U up?”

(I drank both versions, by the way; I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.)

I think I’ll open a summer-only pop-up bar called Cai-Piranha.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

A shockingly large percentage of 20-year-olds are convinced that they make an extremely good piña colada. They aren’t precisely wrong; a 20-year-old’s piña colada tastes really good — to a 20-year old. Fill a blender with ice, pour it about a third of the way up with pineapple juice, half a can or so of pre-sweetened cream of coconut — the one with the parrot on it — and an unconscionable amount of rum.

Grind, whiz, slurp, and you’ve got something that will be a big hit with other 20-year-olds. It’s perfect for a dorm room, or a secret party in your buddy’s parent’s garage.

Many of us go through our adult life still convinced that we make a really good piña colada, until one day, after years of not having one, we confidently blend up a batch and are confronted with the fact that like many decisions we made in our youth this one has not aged well.

Most blender piña coladas are too sweet, too slushy, and taste a little like chemicals. So what if we gave the blender a break and made one much less sweet, and not so redolent of polysorbate 60?

A Grown-Up Piña Colada

• 2 ounces dark rum – I like Gosling’s or Pusser’s
• 3 ounces pineapple juice
• 3 ounces coconut milk
• ½ ounce honey syrup (see below)

Honey and pineapple have a natural affinity for each other. The muskiness of the honey tempers the fruitiness of pineapple juice. Unfortunately, if you drizzle honey onto the ice cubes in a cocktail shaker, it will seize up and won’t mix with other ingredients very well. Most bartenders get around this by using honey syrup. It’s like simple syrup, but made with honey, instead of sugar. The water is like a cocktail for the honey, loosening it up and making it more likely to mingle with its new friends.

Combine an equal amount of honey and water in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir the mixture to make sure the honey is completely diluted in the water, then take it off the heat to cool. Honey is antimicrobial, so this syrup should last indefinitely in your refrigerator.

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice (make sure that it is large enough to hold eight and a half ounces of cocktail). Add all the ingredients, and shake thoroughly. This is one of those times when it’s OK to shake until you hear the ice breaking inside the shaker.

Pour the chilled drink into a Collins glass or a mason jar, then top it off with more ice, and stir it. Theoretically, you could use a mason jar to shake it, then just remove the lid and add a straw. I’m old enough that it seems like it might be fun to hand out unmixed piña colada at a party and have everyone shake theirs at the same time, possibly while listening to KC and the Sunshine Band’s unlamented classic “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty.” At the very least it would humiliate and drive away any children present, giving the grownups a little breathing room.

We’ve already established that honey and pineapple juice complement each other. Coconut and pineapple are both from the same neighborhood; they go way back. With actual coconut milk, the finished drink is silky and rich, rather than overly sweet. It goes without saying that rum is everyone’s friend.

Twenty-year-old you would not be impressed. Which is sort of the point.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

The first few sips of a blender drink are virtually perfect. The problem is that a few minutes later you’ve drunk all the flavor and you’re left with a weak, sad pile of slush.

Which is why, when I want a really cold drink, I rely on crushed ice. It chills the cocktail effectively, but stays apart from it, like a, I don’t know, a lifeguard or something. This metaphor has gotten away from me.

Blueberry Daiquiri

Blueberries in Syrup

• Frozen wild blueberries – regular blueberries are in season and would definitely work for this recipe, but wild ones generally have more flavor and are small enough to get through a large straw; regardless, they should be frozen, to help syrup-ify them
• An equal amount of sugar, by weight
• A pinch of salt

The Daiquiri Itself

• 2 ounces blueberries in syrup
• 2 ounces golden rum – white rum would be a little too subtle for this application; a dark or black rum would overpower the other ingredients; something golden like Faraday is a good daiquiri rum
• 2 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice
• A splash – perhaps an ounce – of club soda
• A large amount of crushed ice – this could be from the door in your refrigerator, or run through an old-fashioned, hand-cranked ice crusher; I prefer to wrap regular ice cubes in a bar towel and smash it up with the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, which gives me a nice mixture of ice, from large half-cubes down to fine snow

Cook the blueberries, sugar and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally. At first it will be a gloppy, slightly purple pile of sugar. Suddenly, a few minutes into the cooking process, the berries will realize the futility of their existential stubbornness and collapse into a thin jam. Keep cooking and stirring, until the liquid starts to boil. Make sure that all the sugar sticking to the sides of the pan has dissolved into the hot blueberry sauce.

Remove from heat, and set aside to cool.

Fill a mixing glass with a couple handfuls of crushed ice, then add the other ingredients. Stir gently, but thoroughly, into a more or less homogeneous solution.

Transfer into a tall glass, and top with a splash of club soda and a few syrupy blueberries.

Take your drink to your deck, or front porch, or fire escape, and drink it with an oversized boba straw while listening to “The Girl from Ipanema.” It could be the original Brazilian version, or the hep-cat, Sammy Davis big band version, or even Amy Winehouse’s take on it, but the important thing is that you can lean back and draw large amounts of blueberries, rum and lemon into yourself, until it’s difficult to know where you end and the samba music starts. In fact, you could make up an entire playlist of nothing but covers of “The Girl from Ipanema” and spend an hour or two comparing them.

Normally, one of the pillars of a good daiquiri is fresh lime juice, but blueberries and lemon get along so splendidly, whether in a cheesecake or a cocktail, that the lemon is a good substitution in this particular drink. It provides the same amount of acidity and zing, but dances — we might even say it sambas — with the blueberries. The syrupy blueberries bring sweetness and depth to the daiquiri and might even make it a little too sweet if not for the club soda, which brings additional zing to the proceedings while diluting the syrup. The crushed ice brings the temperature down enough to make drinking this cocktail intensely, almost painfully, refreshing.

Without bringing your blender into it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.